It is a continuing challenge in health care to ensure that intended health care actions are taken with respect to a given patient. With the proliferation of devices that collect information it has become increasingly difficult to associate patient data with the appropriate patient. Moreover, with the increased complexity of health care practices, even seemingly straightforward tasks such as matching a treatment action to a patient have become more difficult. Horror stories exist about patients receiving the wrong surgical or medical treatment due to failure to confirm the patient's identity or condition, or failure to confirm that the treatment or other health care action taken is the right one for the patient.
Thus, a need exists for action confirmation and validation for proposed health care practices, such as treatments. A need exists as well for improved ease of association between a patient and his or her medical data.
Personal area networks are known that are capable of handling communications using the electrochemical characteristics of a person. Such personal area networks have been used, for example, to uniquely identify persons for security purposes. Personal area networks have been disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,104,913 to McAllister and in an article in IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3&4, 1996-MIT Media Lab, 0018-8670/96, copyright IBM, entitled Personal Area Networks: Near-Field Intrabody Communication, by T. G. Zimmerman. Both publications, together with all other patents, patent applications, and publications referenced herein are hereby incorporated by reference.
There is potential for personal area networks to solve the persistent problems of action confirmation, action validation, and the proper association of patient data.